Guild Wars 2

Brewergamer.8357:

ROFLMAO you have no facts whatsoever. You can already teleport to the mists and take a portal to Lionsarch. You can already do that.

This is… true, but missing some very relevant facts:

- teleporting to the HotM then taking the portal to LA is two loading screns, and your open world position is set to LA… so you still have to waypoint again (so face another loading screen) to get back to anywhere near where you were.

- teleporting to the mists and then back out again is one loading screen each way (so one fewer screen), no waypoint cost, and will put you back exactly where you were. You can, for example, park a character at the top of a JP, port to the mists to bank things, then port them back out to the top of same JP ready for another go tomorrow. You can also easily return to other annoying-to-get-to locations far from waypoints (or with nearby waypoints usually contested).

~~~

I’ll briefly repeat my suggestion from earlier in the thread: just don’t let people portal straight to Heart of the Mists from PvE; make them use the portal in Lion’s Arch.

We should be able to join/queue for games, and edit our PvP build, from anywhere in the open world, but have to waypoint to LA and then to HotM to access the bank/TP/whatever in HotM (that we could’ve just used in LA anyway).

Players who spend a lot of time in Heart of the Mists no longer need to go back and forth between there and LA, so lose out on nothing but loadint screens – and don’t need to pay gems for basic services (because eurgh that sounds horrible) or be restricted by rank (hello, elitism!) like other suggestions in this thread.

Killthehealersffs.8940:

They need more gold sink mechanics , otherwise we will see more 3-5 gold traits ..

By not having bank and tradder on the mist > is forces ppl to go in the PvE world .
While they are forcing the PvE crowd to come in the PvP side in order to use the new PvP UI (arrange amulet- weapons-traits)

Not having them in the mists means we need to use a loading screen - either through the portal in HotM straight to LA, or using the ’leave the mists’ button in the menu.

The same goes for the PvP build window - it’s just one simple loading screen away, nothing more.

The only way it forces people to waypoint (or buy gemstore things) is between PvE maps - since HotM and LA are so easy (and free) to travel between, and LA has everything, neither of your points are actually reasonable gold sinks.

Hype.8032:

I’m just wondering how I’m supposed to secure a stomp with offhand pistol vs rangers, engis, necros, guardians, and warriors now….. I might have to get better on engi because it at least has mechanics that work…

Y’know how it still reliably blinds, just not so spammily?
Y’know how you can avoid their #2 attack with dodges or blocking with terrain, and if they’re timing this around a blind it’ll be easy to predict?

“oh no this thing I was abusing is slightly less exploitable so now I’m useless!”

Blacshades.4579:

Won’t the furry just drain away because you are not in combat, so you won’t have a full 3 bars even if you shoot right away?

1) lol draining away the furry

2) I expect there’ll be 5-10 seconds after gaining Adrenaline that it’ll start to drain, so that combos like this are possible.

3) heeee “Won’t the furry just drain away” sorry but that typo is hilarious

How about this:

HotM can’t be travelled to from anywhere in the open world apart from portals in Lion’s Arch (or introduce an item that includes waypoint fees to get there from anywhere, or charge waypoint fees to get there quickly from PvP menu).

PvP matches can be joined from anywhere - open world, HotM, WvW.

~~~

This is why it would work:

Currently, if you join a hotjoin match from the open world, you can only exit to the open world - there is no way to get straight to Heart of the Mists unless that’s where you joined the map from.

If you join a ranked match from the open world, you can either:
- exit back to the open world (by leaving soon after match finishes)
- return to Heart of the Mists (by hanging around until kicked out of the map)

Neither of these things needs to change.

So there’s no way for non-PvP players to quickly and cheaply get to the amenities we want in HotM (that are already available in LA), but players who hang around in that map don’t have to constantly leave to access their banks or use the Mystic Forge.

And anyone who wants to play a PvP match can do so, without any trouble or extra costs, and there’s still a social area dedicated to PvP where people can chat and look for groups and test on the example foes available.

~~~

Have I missed anything important?

~~~

EDIT - posts soon after mine:

GOSU.9574:

There is a better solution to this, actually.

Add a PvP Build panel option on the left of the PvP panel. This way I can access my build even when in PvE areas including the cultural towns. This way I am not required to be in Mists to change my build, I do not forgo any waypoint costs to access the bank, Trading Post, etc.

Currently the only reason I leave toons in Mists is due to the fact I can’t alter PvP builds from any where else.

Sins.4782:

I don’t think the bank/TP thing would be that much of a problem if we could change our PvP build outside of HotM. At that point, the only reason to use HotM as a hub would be chatting with other PvPers between matches.

Guess I was 7 mins to long in the post box.

Okay, yeah, this - would be great alongside or instead of my suggestions, so we could actually set ourselves up while in a social area. Having to go to HotM to even check your PvP build is a right nuisance!

I quite like the downstate.
It makes burst-bunker play slightly less horrible, since a burster doesn’t automatically win on a quick combo and must spend several more seconds securing their kill.
It’s tied into game/profession mechanics - think about a Backstab Thief getting their basic combo off on a squishy, instantly killing someone and reducing enemy numbers, before easily retreating with their high mobility - would this be okay? Downstate lets the ’defending’ group have at least a chance at keeping their ally alive against a lone foe who can then very quickly reset and start again.

The game has been balanced around it - the example listed above is a pretty potent one, and I’m sure there are a number of others. Removing it would require substantial rebalancing of entire professions, and that just isn’t reasonable to expect.

Anyway, related to this - it’s still horribly unreliable and buggy. Here’s a list of downstate bugs that I encounter with regularity:

Affecting all classes:
- network latency places downed players out of reach - but you have no idea where they actually are. Only solved if they are moved (with a launch or their own movement skill) or if they get ressed/bleed out.
- very occasionally, downing someone while they’re stomping you (already in downstate) won’t stop the stomp from completing.
- "procs-when-downed" skills (Lava Tomb, Putrid Explosion...) don’t usually proc if the player is in the air when they get downed (either falling or jumping).
- when coming out from the downed state, all skills can be unusable for 1-2 seconds. It doesn’t happen every time, so is clearly not intended behaviour. It’s possibly related to the Necro issue with utility skills getting locked out after exiting Death Shroud?

Very important to me, as an Ele main:
- in some patch or other, a delay of about 1 second was added to access to downed skills straight after hitting 0 health. This was to stop players from ’wasting’ their defensive downed #2 skills.
It doesn’t work for the zero-cast-time Vapor Form.
It is incredibly easy to get downed, while casting a #2 weapon skill, and immediately find oneself in Vapor Form - allowing foes to get a stomp (or kill with damage) several seconds earlier than they otherwise would, which can make a huge difference in a busy fight or with allies inbound.
There’s no real way for players to avoid this - the only thing I can think of is "don’t cast certain skills when close to dying", and that’s certianly not a reasonable thing to expect. It can’t be cast during that delay on downed skills... so why is there this moment before this in which it can?

NeXeD.3042:

Frenk.5917:

Xista.7391:

“Top 100”

http://www.gw2score.com/PvP/player/Chilli2976

Well, to be honest that is not really reliable. I checked myself and it says my highest rank is 97, while I have a screenshot of me being rank 80. Maybe it doesn’t calculte low data?

I think it just checks gw2s ranks from the gw2 site every so often.

It occasionally misses an hour or two, and the “rating at end of day” is exactly that – end of day rather than peak rating during that day. For a while it had my top rating a bit low – the only way to fix this is to get above that rating again! :P

If you could only just get near your top rating that once, have not gotten anywhere close since, and will possibly never manage again, however – you probably shouldn’t go around bragging that you’re an incredible player.

T raw.4658:

Dirame.8521:

T raw.4658:

Poplolita.2638:

Probably because of it easily counters downed state #2?

It’s been like this for 2 years

No reason to nerf it now tbh

That’s like saying; because you’ve not been able to walk for 2yrs there’s no reason to repair your spinal cord now.

No its more like saying because you keep bowling gutter balls now we’ll put up bumpers and give you a trophy

So are you that bad a Thief that everything else already kills you?

Domino.1359:

Thank you to all 3 repliers on that question! Lol

Yeah so in a tl;dr: it sucks compared to the other option. By quite a bit! ^__^

(I’m not counting Blinding Ashes as a third option because it doesn’t directly affect dps)

cheshirefox.7026:

my only gripe with this, it should be the arcane 1pnt trait
actually, it should be *merged* with the arcane 1pnt trait
_here’s some eye candy, just to let the idea sink in_

With how little it does for us... yes.

And then we can get a personal versoin of Elemental Attunement as our 3pt Arcana, with the Master trait sharing those boons with allies.

Domino.1359:

New to Ele and jumping on this question: With Fire’s Pyromancer’s Puissance trait(Grandmanster – stacks might every fire weapon skill), why do I never see it used in most builds? It seems more efficient than swapping for combo fields.
I’m asking mainly for PvE solo.

It’s really not more efficient most of the time. For a start, Persisting Flames increases field durations by 2s (can be a pretty significant dps increase with more damage ticks – allows you to maintain Lava Font, for example) and grants fury each time a fire field is blasted.

Fury, granting more critical hits, is pretty great – and you can blast those fire fields while not attuned to fire, so don’t lose all utility when you bring the trait (or lose the effects of this expensive trait when you switch attunements). Bringing Evasive Arcana, Arcane Brilliance and Arcane Wave will, along with blasts from weapon skills, provide pretty good might – and if playing solo, a Sigil of Battle adds that much more.

It’s not viable to sit in Fire Attunement unless with an experienced speedrun group – for open PvE, runs with PUGs or any kind of PvP you’ll need the utility of your other attunements to keep mobile and alive. The only way single-element builds can currently be workable is with Stone Heart and conjured weapons – and they still lose out on a lot of utility, effectively becoming toolbelt-less, non-fluid kit engineers with very high defense.

Wranglerist.5489:

Less passive, more active!

But isn’t the primary damage output for condi Necromancers an easy-to-hit-with autoattack? And passive procs?

If anything, DS makes everything more active – DS Ele has to maintain that high health through careful management of healing abilities (overheal too much and you might find yourself out of skills when the real damage comes), and condi Necro has to time skills well to take down the Ele’s health and burst conditions onto them while they’re below the threshold.

As Piratoz says, they’re slightly different sizes, with the elite being a bit bigger (or if you prefer, the utility being a bit smaller ;p ).

The elite ones also each have an extra skill compared to their utility counterparts - this means they have an extra animation they’ll do to activate it.

Yumiko: they’re not visual differences, though - the elite versions do likely have a lot more health and toughness and do deal some more damage (exact values not known, but people have made some reasonable estimates from in-game testing and added them to the wiki), but neither of these things directly shows up on their models.

Cerebi.2738:

- DesertRose.2031 im confused. u said that the staff ele is limited to 9 stacks of might. then u said that a staff ele can easily get 25 stacks. im confused

They said “with a LH Ele and a Staff Ele” – two players, one (the Staff) camping fire attunement and laying down Lava Fonts for a permanent fire field, the other (something non-Staff with a Lightning Hammer) doing all the blast finishers in those fields to stack might really effectively.

And it’d be daft to add that now - continued might stacking with Evasive Arcana-Earth/Arcane Brilliance/Arcane Wave/allies’ blast finishers, while the Ele just gets on with pummelling bosses?

If you’re bothered about fire fields, campaign for the Flame Axe ones (Burning Retreat and Ring of Fire) to get their durations increased by Persisting Flames! >:P

Think about Lava Font and Frozen Ground – both have very short cast times (0.2s I believe; definitely below 1/4s because they don’t have a cast displayed on tooltip but aren’t instant). The animations, combo fields, and FG’s chilling ticks all start to appear… pretty much instantly. This is after windup and cast time.

Unless it had a really horrible windup, a blind at the start of Lightning Surge would certainly happen quickly enough to be used in split-second situations – sure, it wouldn’t have the advantages of true instants (i.e. can cast at times you can’t use non-instants; no aftercast), but an AoE blind at that range and with that cooldown – on a weapon skill, too – is still hella strong.

I’m all for this skill getting this buff, but I really feel that without some incentive to complete the cast there’d be a lot of (possibly justifiable) complaints about it getting cancelled after the blind – the only way to really find this out is testing with a modified version of the skill, which sadly we can’t do.

Possible ways to encourage full-cast:
- debuff if it’s not fully cast – one or more of vuln/weakness/damage/special debuff applied to caster
- long aftercast if it’s cancelled, short aftercast if not? Iunno how well this could be implemented
- the RTL treatment, but more reasonable (due to shorter base cooldown) – if you deal damage with this primarily damage-dealing attack, it goes on normal cooldown. If you don’t deal damage, increased cooldown. I think this is currently actually my favourite, to discourage spamming it once every time you’re attuned to air but still allow it occasionally.
- others?

Cerebi.2738:

i play mesmer and it gives me minions that tank for me which is nice. i cant find something to tank for me as an ele…

The elite skill Glyph of Elementals, cast in Earth, will give you a very effective tank that really draws aggro well in PvE. There’s also the utility Glyph of Lesser Elementals that can give you a slightly weaker, but still very tough, ally.

Another strong damage mitigation skill, when fighting foes in melee, is Glyph of Storms (also in Earth Attunement), with regular blinding pulses that will shut down the majority of your enemies’ attacks.

These are all useful skills for most of the open world, and can really help in getting used to the profession since you don’t need to spend all your time trying so hard to stay alive.

Frost Bow is great fun as a nuker, but it’s also one more rooting channeled skill that’ll make you stick out like a sore thumb. Bringing more survivability or reliable damage in its place is usually better unless you’ve got an organised team and can keep track of your foes.

I’ve had some fun with the Flame Axe (thanks to KFC for suggesting it), since it’s largely ranged attacks, fire fields/blasts, and some mobility... but that it needs to be summoned first really eats into its effectiveness. Great fun in PvE, since it makes it really easy to maintain 20-25 might AoE on my own (with Evasive Arcana/Arcane Brilliance/Arcane Wave).

The Earth Shield is... not that great. Its invuln stops all other actions and doesn’t even contest capture points, the autoattack is terrible (and I think one step still can’t be manually interrupted with a dodge?), and the control from daze/pull is, far too clunky and ineffective to use against mobile foes (and likely to be negated with stability by less mobile ones). It needs to break stuns on cast or provide some other practical effect to be at all worthwhile in its current state.

Duran.3196:

And now that Elementalist is finally in a good position again, for good ppl even in a very good position (celestial DD can be quite strong in the right hands)
PPL start to cry again: nerf nerf nerf

Nah, condi Necromancers who can’t adapt have been moaning about this trait since it was first announced.

So have many other people, often citing pretty good reasons (such as ‘it sucks’), but those who complain most consistently and have the weakest arguments are usually those condi-Necro-mains.

sirloin.9145:

1. This is about one trait . A trait that says: Conditions cannot be applied to you when your health is above 90%. Its beyond me that any class should have a trait like this that removes certain builds completely.

And your build removed a certain class completely for long enough, and still completely destroys “certain builds” (some Ele, some not).

2. I’m not just using one build and one class (Necro ain’t my main). And i have never come across a more punishing trait like diamond skin.

If you can’t deal with it, it’s your skill level or ignorance that is the problem, not the trait. People have suggested ways in this thread to deal with it as condi Necro (that work), and there’s been plenty of discussion elsewhere about it too (from various classes who run condi builds – consensus is that the trait isn’t worth taking most of the time, and certainly isn’t any more broken than those few builds it hard-counters.

If people can’t see y this trait is bad for pvp u aint pvp players.
Last post from me.

I ran it for long enough. I did a (very) short stint again after the feature patch. In PvP.

How this went:
It was great when new, because nobody knew how to deal with it. Then people learned its really significant weakness – that if the DS Ele brings cleanse, they’re going to do no damage, and if they don’t bring cleanse, they’re really easy to kill. Ta-da!

But an instant AoE blind each time you’re in Air Attunement? That’s very powerful, and I expect everyone would cancel the cast every time so they could get on with other skills that hit more reliably.

Unless its CD was pretty long (20s+), I don’t see this being accepted by anyone - and I’d really rather not add another horrible cooldown to Air.

Maybe something about the surge backfiring on the caster if it’s not released at foes? Some damage and stacks of vuln (or even some weakness or another debuff?) on the Ele - so that the instant blind can still be used to good effect (safestomp etc.) but it can’t just be tossed about willy-nilly in fights.

ArrDee.2573:

It’s wacky to go through 2 load screens and spend silver to get back to what we were doing!

Also, there’s a button on the first tab of the PvP window – it says “Go to the Heart of the Mists” when you’re in Tyria/WvW, “Leave Match” if you’re currently in a match that you can leave (so hotjoin or postgame in a ranked match – it’s functionally identical to the door icon in the lower right corner) and “Leave the Mists” if you’re currently in HotM.

“Leave Match” always takes you to your previous location, be that HotM or anywhere in the open world (but not WvW or instances). “Leave the Mists” takes you to the last place you were in the open world.
This means that even if you do get distracted by one last battle or sorting your inventory, you don’t need to go to LA and then another loading screen + waypoint fee to get back to what you were doing!

Archaon.9524:

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

minimal rank points must be given.
for the sake of rank progress.

Why should you be able to progress in your ranks if you’re actually doing nothing that requires even a bit of skill? Then they should give points and rewards for killing hom npcs too since many hj heroes are even easier to get down than those…

1) People keep asking for a minimum rank to enter competitive queues. If HJ gives no rank points, how on earth do you expect that to work?

2) Y’know how you still gain rank if you lose in tPvP? How it’s possible to afk in every match (and really annoy your team) but still come out of it with some loot? It’d actually be less effort to purposefully afk in teamq games than to mess about trying to win (or at least ‘qualify for winner rewards’) in soloq, and the daily caps (on rank/coin/track progress) for teamq are much higher or nonexistent.
I really hope nobody ever actually tries this (and that anyone who does is given a fun permaban for their efforts) but with current rewards it could happen!

3) Hotjoin still serves a purpose as an easy, low-commitment way for people to try out PvP. We really do need an improved tutorial, to introduce newbies to PvP – possibly something like the PvE hints system with tips coming up every couple of matches with new information, iunno – but it’s also very necessary to have an almost sandbox-y place to let people try out these techniques and learn how to play at all effectively.

sirloin: and if we put an Ele not running Diamond Skin in a fight with your condi necro... will you not wipe the floor with them?

If you’ve gone all-out 100% into maxing out one aspect of a build, of course it’s going to be more likely to have hard counters - just as it’s much more likely to be a hard counter to certain other builds.

Also... bring Flesh Golem, use Charge when the Ele leaves water attunement, condibomb them. Hooray.

Evan Lesh.3295:

I’ve adjusted the position at low resolutions to always be below the targeting UI.

<3

Continue to hope that some patch, at some point, will give us useful UI customisation -but a fix like this is much appreciated!

Phyrak: applying the blind at the start of cast would actually be pretty great - it’d make it harder to rupt the cast in time, and generally give us improved sustain.

It would probably then just end up as an instant-AoE-blind, though, and never get fully charged - I guess it’d need to have a channel that couldn’t be cancelled or some major drawback to not finishing the full cast if the blind was stuck on at the start rather than the end.

I’m still in favour of the following (seen suggested several times before), to discourage repeated casting of individual skills but that wouldn’t stop Thieves from carrying out any regular combos:

- keep initiative regen (and interaction with chill) the same as at present
- give skills a short ’cooldown’ (possibly different lengths for different skills, but I’d guess at around 3s each?)
- this ’cooldown’ does not disable skills like regular cooldowns
- instead, if the skill is used again while under the effect of this ’cooldown’, it has an increased initiative cost (probably just 1 for any skill)
- this increased cost may stack if skills are spammed repeatedly; I guess it’d need tested to see - even increasing the cost by 1 has a significant effect on how regularly a skill can be used

It’s not a projectile at all - so it can’t be reflected - and doesn’t rely on a ground-targeted red ring during cast (which is very easy to spot and dodge). This is also true of our utility signets, and things like Mesmer GS AA and many of the Necro attacks on Scepter/Focus/Axe/Daggers (though not the Dagger AA chain).

Your changes seem... pretty drastic, but spike damage *is* part of what Air Attunement is meant to be about. I don’t see the skill getting its functionality completely changed, though - particularly not to a single-target ’sniper’ shot, when the Staff is all about AoE madness rather than stealth attacks from range.

Phyrak.7260:

- Have as an addendum, “Combo Field Projectile” for aftermath

Important things to note about this skill:

- it’s not a projectile
- it’s not ground AoE

These two factors make it different to all but one other Staff skill: Fire #3, Flame Blast (which is primarily AoE burning, rather than AoE direct damage).

Turning it into yet another projectile (see: all AAs, Earth #5) or hard-to-land ground AoE (just about everything else) is something I object to – unless it maybe became a very fast cast and fast-travelling lightning bolt?

I believe, if it’s seen as underpowered right now, the best change is to slightly lower the cast time. It’s got a high recharge for a #2, at 10s, and I’d even be alright with that getting upped to maybe 12s if it was a more reliable skill to land in battle (with 0.75-1s cast time).

The only argument I can think of against this is that it would make the (de)buff bar too cluttered... but when all the junk from a Guild Heroes Banner and other non-PvP boosts shows up in PvP, I don’t see any problem with adding more *useful* icons too.

Would only be one or two per class, anyway - and it’d certainly remove a lot of the random effects that proc without warning.

Evan Lesh.3295:

What resolution are you running the game at?

I get this problem a lot – I’m running in a window that’s usually about 1205×935, judging by new and past screenshots (height ranges from ~925-940, but as far as I’m aware I’ve always had this issue no matter what height the window is). Desktop resolution is 1280×1024.

For below, tl;dr: why are we not allowed to resize or reposition the majority of the stuff on our screen?

I still don’t understand why the interface isn’t more customisable – it’d a feature that could allow users to solve all problems like these, wouldn’t need to be explained to people who don’t need to use it, and that many players got used to playing with in gw1.
We get to swap party info/chatbox on the left side (with concise (and uninformative) or cluttered (but with non-boon effects) options for party info – outside of sPvP – and minor resizing of the chat box available).
On the right… it’s just map at top, map at bottom, resize map.
Oh, and ‘interface size’, which affects all items on screen and can mess up the trading post’s appearance. Can’t forget that!

Raven Twospirit.9342:

For getting around in the open world, I’ve been grabbing “Windborne Daggers” in the Archana line. If you run around with a pair of daggers, the speed increase is significant. It isn’t quite permanent swiftness, but it’s pretty decent. Once I get where I am going, I switch back to my normal weapon set (which happens to be D/F anyway), and can quickly shuffle those 2 points from Archana back where they should be.

If you’re doing this, you might as well just equip Signet of Air instead – it’s permanent 25% speed buff, and is only one skill to switch out from your bar rather than finding the traits list/doing weapons in inventory.

Anton.1769:

are you kidding? pls ask google what is ’necrothreading’ and what is ’hot thread’.
Or in your opinion all threads whith age of 1st message more then 30 days must be permadeleted?

By the rules in the WvW forum, that are now being enforced here, posting in a thread where the last reply (not first post) is more than 30 days old counts as necromancy.

http://i.imgur.com/J6k0Isr.png

^ thread I posted

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Please-don-t-necro-threads/first#post4247666

^ link I posted in that thread

So why does this thread get necroed regularly? It’s definitely gone >30 days at least once (staff are welcome to waste time checking themselves; at least a couple are capable of writing a couple of lines of code to do so quickly).

Xista.7391:

Lux.7169:

don’t you hit r9 after one game these days?

~10k rank points

Which is approximately 30 wins, in hotjoin – or 60 losses.

These numbers are skewed by the time-scaling introduced to hj games. They’re only accurate if players win and were on the map for 8+ minutes* in a match.

Anyway – at least 30 games, and probably 40-50, likely 60 – this rank requirement is the best we can hope for right now. If (when?) ladders come in, those with more experience won’t have anything to worry about (since new players won’t be able to appear in higher-rated ladders without a looong lucky streak) – but until then, any rank restriction is welcome.

Even so… while rank restriction is welcome, a better PvP tutorial would be better! Possibly even one that’s replayable, so non-new players can check it out and possibly even provide constructive feedback – rather than the current one that barely touches on most PvP tactics, and doesn’t suggest/link to any other sources of PvP information.

(slightly related: why is the /wiki command not clearly documented in-game? In my experience, no vaguely inexperienced player has ever heard anything about it. GW1 at least had a wiki searchbox in the f10 help menu!)

*still not quite sure if this is accurate – I’m certain that it’s 7 or 8 minutes (or somewhere in between).

^__^
You’re welcome - hopefully more people will be able to see this and bring these bots to the attention of ANet staff.

Sorry that I can’t give you any actually useful advice - we can only hope that proper PvP abuse reporting options are among the must-keep-quiet things that Evan Lesh has been allowed to vaguely mention, regarding PvP improvements in the near future.

uberkingkong.8041:

As well as the fact that you cannot complete most dailies with just straight pvp anymore.

Yes you can, it just takes more than the old 3-games-done.

&gt; skill points/leveller: you get these from reward tracks pretty fast (scrolls/tomes of knowledge)
&gt; recycler: get loot from reward tracks, buy salvage kits from the merchant
&gt; matches played/captures: easy, done, these ones carried over from old dailies
&gt; kills/dodges/condition remover/anything else combat: combat! Easy! The whole point of PvP!

So yeah, all dailies are certainly doable just from PvP, and most (if not all) days you can actually get 6+ dailies without leaving HotM/matches. It’s not nearly so easy to farm them quickly, but ANet have been trying for ages to make dailies take more than just ten minutes and require some actual playtime.

Yeah I believe the current best way to go about it is just to bring as much consistent dps as possible – force or accuracy or maybe fire/air, along with a <slaying> sigil for any particular dungeon.

Rainshine.5493:

You lose stacks if you swap weapons now.

… I’ll let someone much better at dungeoning than me answer the rest.

You lose stacks if you change equipped weapons, and you can only stack with one weapon at a time – D/D with dual bloodlust will still only give one bloodlust stack per kill.

They (finally) actually fixed it, so ganksquads in WvW can’t run around with 25 bloodlust, use other sigils, and camp spawns.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Dahkeus.8243:

Agreed with the OP.

And no, people shouldn’t be told to just “stop playing hotjoin”. If you have a guest over and they step in a puddle of pee that’s sitting in the middle of your floor, you shouldn’t just tell them not to step in it. You clean that @#$# up!

If you’re the guest and you notice your host’s house has had the same puddle of pee on the middle of the floor for two years, you don’t bother to tell him to clean it up. You just step around it.

No, you stop going to their house.

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

New: burning speed now goes backward.

And just to make sure Staff users don’t feel left out, Burning Retreat now goes in a random direction.

Phaeton.9582:

Such a necro butttt….

….This post could be relevant for the upcoming balance patch. It seems the devs are thinking along similar lines now (blinding ashes/introducing revealed to other zerker builds).

So what about burning also revealing invisible players? Maybe lowering the cooldown on the blind too? You lose ALOT of QoL traiting 30 into fire – especially as s/f has enough dps while traiting 0/30/0/20/20 now anyway…

Yey for releant necromancy!

I was thinking this – Blinding Ashes is pretty terrible, since it’s hard to reliably burn outsside of fire attunement and the CD is global rather than per-foe. Adding Revealed to it would maybe make it sliiightly more friendly when solo roaming, with burning AoEs like Ring of Fire or Flame Wall providing pretty useful area control.

Romek.4201:

Liewec.2896:

it must have took some digging to find this, but totally worth it, bravo!
so did this “hotfix” ever actually happen?
and if so does that mean there was a point were skyhammer was even more intolerable?
:O

this fix was an placebo

The fix actually did happen, it restructured the side points and hammer platform a bit – they really were even worse before it, since random knockbacks were almost guaranteed to get kills then, whereas now at least a tiny, tiny bit of positional awareness is required when running a knockback build.

Pulls, however – those oh-so-fun pulls – were barely affected. Only certain knockbacks/launches (like Stomp and Tornado) got properly weakened by it.

DaveGan.8065:

It’s the only thing people can do to counter team stacking and 1v2/2v3/3v4/4v5, which probably has a much worse effect than this match manipulation that you speak of. *Spectate/rebalance happens as a result of severely imbalanced matches, not the other way around.*

On top of that, apparently having 10 people in the server, playing or spectating/AFK, will "soft cap" it ("Play Now" will no longer send people in), you will often end up with 4v5 with a spectator and greatly diminished chance of someone else coming in to take that last spot.

If you want more even matches in a setting where people can just come and go, then *you need to reduce the win-loss reward gap and provide extra incentives for someone to join/stay on a losing team*. AB volunteer is one example of this done right, and I am generally the first person to click the button unless playing with friends. I am happy to play for the underdog, but I am not enough of a masochist to sacrifice 60% of the rewards for it.

Until then, if people are farming rank points by stacking one side, I will have zero bad feeling about forcing myself into the farm with the spectate button.

Exactly this.

It is *not fun* to be in an outnumbered match and get stomped over and over again - and get loser-level rewards for playing an unfair match.
It’s not a good way to practice/test most builds, and gets especially frustrating when deliberate rank/skill stacking will put more experienced players on the same team.

In such imbalanced matches, I have absolutely no problem with spectate-AB-rejoin - either doing it myself in a match that my team clearly has no chance in, or performed by someone else in a team I’m fighting against.
It’s only possible to do when already outnumbered, and the vast majority of outnumbered HJ matches start and end with one team completely dominating. Is it really *that* fun to beat foes you already have a pretty big advantage over?

Hotjoin rewards (rank/coin/track progress) are poor compared to other modes, but the difference between win and loss rewards is still significant enough that it feels really unfair for people who happen to have a smaller team size to lose out.

A couple of things that could help:
1) If players click "play now", immediately take them into a map and put them onto a team. Either the team with fewer players, or that with the lowest score. They can leave a team and spectate if they wish, but pre-spectating to choose the best team just contributes to the imbalance.
2) If players switch to spectator mode, don’t let them rejoin either team for the remainder of the match. Certainly don’t let them join the winning team. Leavers triggering autobalance? Cool, this is why it exists. Spectating to force AB? I support it while new players get to join the winning team and so keep matches unfair, but once this is fixed then AB exploits can also be fixed.
3) Clarify that getting autobalanced gives winner rewards, and that volunteering gives a small bonus on top of that. Most people seem to think of AB as ’stealing their win’ when it’s really just ’stopping you from killing so many people in unfair fights, while still giving you winner rewards’.

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

It’s way more than just 25% damage reduction because it bypasses crits: weakness effectively reduces crit chance by 50%! Therefore it is very strong against classes that rely on crit procs a lot (mesmers, thieves, etc).

Yeah weakness used to be utterly terrible, as it had no effect on crits so crit-heavy builds effectively ignored the condition. It became many times more effective when the patch allowing it to turn crits into glances was released.

BrunoBRS.5178:

cheese.4739:

BrunoBRS.5178:

i imagine it does. so yay two lightning fields in the entire game.

Oi, there are… several!

Ele Staff Air #5: Static Field
Lightning Hammer #5: Static Field (doesn’t benefit from Blasting Staff trait, since it’s not on the Staff)
Ele Trident Air #5: Lightning Cage
Ele falling damage trait, Arcane Abatement (Water trait I) when attuned to air: creates a Static Field

So that’s 4 existing methods, though only 2 of them are regularly used. Add two Tornadoes to the mix and we’ll have 6 (6!) lightning fields in the game. That’s more than the number of ice fields!

underwater combat doesn’t count, it’s impossible to use fields on it.

the other 3 existing methods all summon the exact same skill.

“only 2 of them are regularly used”
The 2 that I don’t see as regularly used are Lightning Cage (because underwater combat is especially uncommon in PvP areas) and Arcane Abatement (only used for the damage mitigation, not the field – though I do use it for running the bomb in Griffonrook Run as Ele!).

Combo fields being unreliable underwater? Yes, some finishers don’t work well in them – but most projectiles aimed at foes within the field, or leaps/blasts/whirls that take place within the field, will still go off every time.

And with “the exact same skill”? They have seperate cooldowns, they interact with traits differently (as I said, the Lightning Hammer field doesn’t work with Blasting Staff, but both Arcane Abatement and Staff Air #5 do).

The skills having similer or identical functionality doesn’t mean that they’re not still seperate fields, anyway! It’s a different opportunity for Eles to bring this field type, and means that builds not running either Staff or Lightning Hammer will be able to make use of it (or let their allies make use of it).

Romek.4201:

lol good necro thread

will be merged with the 999site skyhammer thread and finally has arenanet tag^^

yessssssssssssss

BrunoBRS.5178:

i imagine it does. so yay two lightning fields in the entire game.

Oi, there are… several!

Ele Staff Air #5: Static Field
Lightning Hammer #5: Static Field (doesn’t benefit from Blasting Staff trait, since it’s not on the Staff)
Ele Trident Air #5: Lightning Cage
Ele falling damage trait, Arcane Abatement (Water trait I) when attuned to air: creates a Static Field

So that’s 4 existing methods, though only 2 of them are regularly used. Add two Tornadoes to the mix and we’ll have 6 (6!) lightning fields in the game. That’s more than the number of ice fields!

DiogoSilva.7089:

Engineer’s tornado is going to become a lightning field in addition to its whirl finisher, so I assume the same will happen to elementalist’s elite.

Oh yes! I didn’t consider that this could happen. Tiny bit more damage from brutal bolts in MS+tornado combo.

Orion.3812:

The only way to improve is to try changing something and see how it works. Removing maps from the rotation is just backtracking to where we were before.

Try changing something? Introduce a new map!

New map is clearly imbalanced in a whoooole bunch of ways, as well as full of bugs? Not at all popular with the community? Try to fix it!

Fixed new map still incredibly imbalanced and still full of all those bugs? Still hated by the majority of players? Causing 4v5s and ragequits from the whole game?

What now?

Tweak it more?

Or maybe consider that it’s the basic design elements of the map that are at fault. The hugely powerful secondary objective, and that this secondary objective and the side points are largely controlled through instagib mechanics, are what drive people to afk on the map when it pops.